How Digital Thread, Digital Twin, and AR Solutions Can Accelerate Digitization in Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0

At PTC’s LiveWorx 2019, the company highlighted the numerous capabilities of digital transformation in smart manufacturing and industry 4.0 that rely on digital tread and digital twin concepts, which unlock new opportunities in both virtual and physical environments. PTC provides a range of digital tools that empower employees with extra capabilities and enable digital transformation across the value chain, from product design to equipment maintenance and service: Creo, its Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software; Windchill, its Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software; ThingWorx, its Internet of Things (IoT) platform; and Vuforia, its Augmented Reality (AR) Software Development Kit (SDK).

The compnay also provided updates regarding its partnership ecosystem, which has expanded with its acquisition of AR service provider TWNKLS, and the process of its strategic alliances, such as its partnership with Rockwell Automation. In collaboration with its key partners, PTC also presented various use cases that show digital transformation’s numerous rewards in terms of Return on Investment (ROI), employee performance, reduced operational costs, customer satisfaction, best practices for successful digital transformation, and other common challenges.

PTC is not alone in efforts in any of these areas; Industry 4.0 and IoT continue to see growth and adoption as part of the wider digitization trends, and augmented reality is both growing as an additional part of this story and as a mature, standalone path toward unique use cases and ROI. PTC’s focus on Augmented Reality as a key part of their digital thread story highlights the potential not only for AR and PTC, but AR as a whole.

Capturing and analyzing complex data in order to make accurate decisions and predict potential errors are main characteristics of a digital transformation journey. Employees in industrial and manufacturing verticals heavily rely on data in order to maintain high levels of productivity, ensure product/service quality, optimize tasks and processes, predict/reduce machine downtime, and reduce costs.

The ideas of digital twins and digital thread themselves are not new (digital thread more so than digital twin), but PTC’s use of digital thread is, while more marketing than anything, a way to highlight how important cohesion is for a platform. The concept helps businesses deal with data challenges and make fast and well-informed decisions by virtually bringing together real-time data and information from machine statuses, production flow and quality standards, supply chain statuses, and more. The digital thread concept ensures that employees have access to all critical data and insights in the time and place that they need them, in order to maintain workflow and avoid extra costs that usually result from machine downtime or delays in identifying the right data.

The digital thread concept can be seen as an extension of the digital twin and is important for enabling a full-fledged AR solution, especially in industry. A digital twin is the bridge between the digital and physical worlds that enables employees to visualize assets, the assembly line process, or anything else that can be digitized by leveraging both new and existing data. Digital twins allow employees to access and define assets’ performance standards and operating conditions and simulate how a machine or process will perform under various conditions (planned/unplanned). Both concepts can be integrated into existing systems and disruptive technologies such as IoT and AI, increasing value and providing complete solutions throughout products’ lifecycles.

The role of AR tools, such as mobile devices and smart glasses, in digital twin concepts is that they are able to “understand” the environment surrounding a user and overlay real-time data and information from assets or production lines. The combination of these technologies allows onsite workers to better understand data and the components of a machine, be more confident, save valuable time searching for the data that they need, and complete tasks more quickly and accurately. In addition, by leveraging data from digital twins and utilizing AR tools, businesses can train and support inexperienced workers with remote assistance applications that provide real time virtual guidance, removing the travelling costs. VR can be an alternative option for training instead of AR because businesses can integrate data and 3D simulations generated from digital twins into VR headsets for more immersive training experiences.